MAGA Is Waging War on the Future

At times people wonder how the advances and knowledge of the Roman Empire were lost and Europe descended into the Dark Ages.  True Roman was invaded by hostile "barbarian" tribes but much of the destruction came from internal forces ranging from growing wealth disparities and the pauperization of the masses and the erasure of knowledge that conflicted with the dogma of the increasingly powerful Christian Church.  All of this was a war on what could have been a very different future.   Fast forward to 2025 and we see an in some ways similar war against the future by the Felon and MAGA supporters that will ultimately leave America poorer, sicker, less democratic, less educated and more backward that what otherwise be the case.  If one looks at Project 2025, the blueprint for much of what is being done it is a white "Christian" nationalist/supremacy agenda that puts the rights of the minority over the wellbeing of the many.  Social programs and benefits for the many are targeted for draconian funding cuts while ever more tax cuts are showered on the super wealthy.  One has to wonder how bad things will need to get before the MAGA working class base realizes their bigotry and prejudice has cost them and their children dearly. A column in the New York Times looks at this war on the future:

It’s fitting that a political movement whose slogan is the backward looking “Make America Great Again” — and whose tribune, Donald Trump, appears to live in an eternal 1990 of his own mind — is waging war on the American future.

This war has four theaters of conflict. In the first, Trump is waging war on constitutional government, with a full spectrum attack on the idea of the United States as a nation of laws and not men. He hopes to make it a government of one man: himself, unbound by anything other than his singular will. Should the president win his campaign against self-government, future Americans won’t be citizens of a republic as much as subjects of a personalist autocracy.

In the second theater of conflict, the MAGA movement is waging war on the nation’s economic future, rejecting two generations of integration and interdependency with the rest of the world in favor of American autarky, of effectively closing our borders to goods and people from around the world so that the United States might make itself into an impenetrable fortress — a garrison state with the power to dictate the terms of the global order, especially in its own hemisphere. . . . . “This is the new model,” the secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, said in an interview with CNBC last month, “where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.” The reality is that this particular campaign — this effort to de-skill the working population of the United States — is more likely to immiserate the country and impoverish its residents than it is to inaugurate a golden age of prosperity.

. . . [T]he White House is also fighting a pitched battle against a sustainable climate future.  In the same way that Trump and his allies have rejected the obligation to pass the nation’s tradition of self-governance on to the next generation, they have also rejected the obligation to pass a living planet on to those who will inherit the earth. Theirs, instead, is an agenda of unlimited resource extraction, with little regard for the consequences. . . . Trump is aiming to open national forests to logging and has issued an executive order that would expedite efforts to engage in deep-sea mining, despite the risks it poses to critical ecosystems. He is also openly hostile to renewable energy, despite its growing efficiency and declining cost.

The White House wants to wipe out a large part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — slashing its budget by a quarter and shuttering programs in climate research — as well as obliterate a third of the budget of U.S. Geological Survey, an agency whose work is vital, notes Science magazine, “to efforts such as monitoring water quality, protecting endangered species, and predicting landscape impacts from climate change.”

The fourth and final theater of the MAGA movement’s war on the future is adjacent to the third one: an assault on the nation’s capacity to produce scientific, technological and medical breakthroughs.

Whether under the guise of ending diversity efforts, disciplining institutions of higher education or commandeering the federal administrative state for the president’s corrupt purposes, the White House has taken a buzz saw to billions of dollars in federal grants for research in medicine and the hard sciences. In the first three months of the year, according to a minority report of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, the Trump administration cut $2.7 billion from the National Institutes of Health, including funds for biomedical research and experimental cancer treatments.

In addition, the White House wants to cut spending in the Department of Energy’s research wing — the nation’s single largest funder of the physical sciences, which supports efforts to translate basic research into new technologies and applications — and seeks to defund or eliminate global disease monitoring and health-tracking systems at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This is the wanton, pointless destruction of a MAGA cultural revolution. It serves no obvious purpose other than to “shrink” the government in the most arbitrary and capricious way imaginable. The federal government is the leading source of funding for science and technology research in the United States. How does one make America great again by destroying its capacity to develop advanced technology?

Even the most venal and shortsighted billionaire captains of industry should recognize how much their fortunes and influence rest on the work of countless researchers whose efforts often yield results that pay dividends for years. We can’t know, for certain, what technologies and treatments Americans will miss out on because the Trump administration either decided it was too expensive to maintain the American science establishment or thought that science was too liberal, too “woke.” But there’s no doubt that we’ll be worse off. And this is to say nothing of the potential brain drain of scientists who will leave this country for greener pastures, or those from abroad who will choose to remain in their home countries, where they live under governments that are at least a little less eager to give themselves lobotomies.

Trump and his allies are fighting a war on the future and in particular on the idea that our technological progress should proceed hand in hand with social and ethical progress — on the liberal universalism that demands an expansive and expanding area of concern for the state and society. And they are fighting a war for the future insofar as this means the narrowing of our moral horizons for the sake of unleashing certain energies tied to hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality.

It is a future in which the United States abandons its Enlightenment heritage and liberal aspirations in favor of a closed society made up of supposedly native people — recall JD Vance’s paean to the soil of eastern Kentucky in his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination last year — and rooted in notions of dominance and zero-sum competition.